Assad Is Just Being Modest About The Secret Of Syria's Success

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Syrian President Bashar Assad reveals the secret of his success--he and the Syrian people share the same beliefs:

I am not talking here on behalf of the Tunisians or the Egyptians. I am talking on behalf of the Syrians. It is something we always adopt. We have more difficult circumstances than most of the Arab countries but in spite of that Syria is stable. Why? Because you have to be very closely linked to the beliefs of the people. This is the core issue. When there is divergence between your policy and the people's beliefs and interests, you will have this vacuum that creates disturbance. So people do not only live on interests; they also live on beliefs, especially in very ideological areas. Unless you understand the ideological aspect of the region, you cannot understand what is happening.

Assad is too modest to reveal what those shared beliefs are, namely that if you cross the government: they will kill you. The way that the Syrian government did in the Hama Massacre:

The first and by far only reported Syrian employment of a chemical warfare agent took place in 1982, in a conflict between Islamic insurgents of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Shiite Alawi Muslim sect, which with just a tenth the country's population had ruled Syria for three decades under the President Hafez al-Assad. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Syria's Muslim Brotherhood sought to destabilize and unseat the Hafez Assad regime through political assassinations and urban guerilla warfare. In February 1982, the Muslim Brotherhood ambushed government forces who were searching for dissidents in Hama. Several thousand Syrian troops, supported by armor and artillery, moved into the city and crushed the insurgents during over two weeks of bloodshed. When the fighting was over, perhaps as many as 7,000 to 35,000 people lay dead, including an estimated 1,000 soldiers. In addition, large sections of Hamah's old city were destroyed. Lethal cyanide gas was reportedly used by the Syrian regime in the slaughter of Sunni residents of the city of Hama. Use of hydrogen cyanide is unsubstantiated, but reports in the 1980s suggested that hydrogen cyanide was used by the Syrian government against the uprising in Hama.

So much for Syrian ideology.
And yes, that Muslim Brotherhood sure does get around, doesn't it.

Technorati Tag: Hama Massacre and Muslim Brotherhood.